How one gets "huge" numbers depends on what you mean by "huge." One uses different nuclear decay chains to measure much older dates (say, billions of years vs. thousands). Age-of-the-universe estimates involve very different processes than age-of-moon, age-of-Earth, age-of-a-fossil, age-of-a-lava-flow, age-of-a-pot-shard, age-of-a-painting, and age/time-of-death-of-a-murder-victim, just to name a few. All involve some assumptions about what one is looking at, physics/chemistry/biology to model the change in the sample since the date of origin, and other experimental data sources to calibrate the time scale of the process.
For nuclear decay processes, it is possible to measure half-lives directly using large samples of isotopically-pure materials in the laboratory, along with sensitive detection of radioactivity. (For instance: http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRC/v10/i1/p383_1). Roughly speaking, radioactive decay can be measured on billions of billions of atoms at the rate of millions of decays in a day to determine how many billions of years the half-life is.
One must assume that nuclear decays is a random process, which is consistent with basically all laboratory observations, and one must assume that nuclear physics was the same billions of years ago as it is today, but there is indirect evidence that this assumption is at least not wildly inaccurate.
Nuclear physicists can also model the nuclear dynamics that determine nuclear half-lives and the stability of various nuclei and their reaction pathways.
There are also model assumptions, such as the relative isotopic concentrations in the sample at the date of origin. These must be obtained indirectly, or by reasonable judgement.
Scientists have real reasons for saying the universe is billions of years old. People used to argue the observed universe might be literally eternal, just as they argued that it is something like 6000 years old. Modern science has discarded *both* extremes, so it is not particularly biased one way or another. I don't know of anyone arguing today for a universe or earth 50 million, 500 million, 50 billion, 500 billion, or 5 trillion years old. Science has really eliminated a wide range of possibilities. As opposed to people who have one book that they keep holding up as the source of their knowledge, regardless of what anyone else observes.
You are using the term "historically documented" very loosely, if you are including the flood in Genesis. Do fairy tales count as historical documentation for the wolf eating Little Red Riding Hood? That little pigs once built houses?
The evidence for a "great dying" is similarly obtained as evidence that shows that there was no human existence before about 2 million years ago, no human civilization before a few thousand years ago, while the mass extinctions took place tens and hundreds of millions of years ago.
It has nothing at all to do with any human culture, history, or legend. Your "documented explanation" explains exactly nothing about the "great dying" in question. And to suppose it does, you would have to assume that dinosaurs and wooly mammoths were on Noah's ark as well.
To the extent that biblical "documentation" of biological or paleontological matters makes any kind of testable predicition, it fails miserably. There is absolutely no scientific reason to give the Bible credence as a source of any physical or biological knowledge. Even when it can be used as historical knowledge, it has apparently exaggerated the size and influence of the Kingdom of David, for instance, as would be expected from an observer showing human biases.
Actually, those links you provide don't consist of "real research," either.
Everyone knows radioactive dating has various limitations and caveats, which could affect any measurement. Trumpeting this like it is some hidden secret of the anti-creationists is misleading.
Trying to hide absolutely absurd theories behind the small percentage of genuinely doubtful radioactive dating results, and absolutely ignoring the huge number of uncontroversial dating results which contradict these theories is completely hypocritical.
Another way these creationists work is they take some sample that is way out of the age for which a lab process is accurate, find that the lab process indeed gives inaccurate results for these samples, and claim that this is a problem with "carbon" dating. Or, they selectively use anomalous dating results to bolster their otherwise ludicrous ideas about geological history.
What I meant by civil records is the idea that there is something like a municipal ledger recording specific information about individuals: registering deeds, births, deaths, marriages, court cases, etc. It seemed by your suggestion that Jesus *should* be found in census records that you were referring to a manuscript list of individual names with occupations or something similar.
There is no doubt that the Empire knew with some accuracy how many citizens and other people it had in each of its districts, and probably had aggregate data on things like agricultural output. Just that these aggregate data don't have any connection to a particular individual you might hope to learn about.
You won't find my name even in modern U.S. census records, even though I have been counted. The fraction of Romans whose personal identifying information were preserved on any "permanent" document, much less a surviving one, is absolutely miniscule, as far as I can tell; and more likely to be correlated to closeness to Rome and influence in mainstream Roman arts, letters, or politics, not to rabblerousing in a distant province.
No, the point is your belief appears to be meaningless gibberish. Also, the key point of your belief is apparently that you *disbelive* some portion of relativity or current theories of electrodynamics. I am asking you to explain what it is you disbelieve in well-tested areas of physics.
Beliefs in these areas are usually subject to experimental test. Good faith requires that you compare the consequences of your beliefs to the results of experiments, and if they contradict experiment, to abandon those beliefs.
Some people also believe they can trisect the angle with straightedge and compass; they can be proven *wrong*. That they continue to believe it proves they are incapable of understanding the meaning of proof.
I'm not aware of any substantial corpus of civil records surviving from Roman times. It is unrealistic to suppose that there are huge archives of Roman documents to find evidence remaining of any commoner's life. Is there any remaining fragment whatsoever of *any* Roman census record?
It is not surprising, therefore, that we lack such archival evidence of Jesus' life.
So, instead of an incredibly well-proven theory with definite techniques of calculation, based on the principle that Lorentz-invariance is a basis of physical theory, you have an alternative
"free-floating particles that surf on light waves of Ether"
Which of your terms have any real meaning---what do
mean in your theory? What formulas do I write down to calculate the Lamb shift, and the gyromagnetic ratio of the electron? How do I calculate Compton scattering? How do I describe laser action? Is your theory Lorentz-invariant? Does it reproduce the relativistic behavior of cosmic muons and particles in colliders?
Relativity is not just one experiment; it is hundreds of experimental results that indicate that there is no preferred rest frame for electromagnetic phenomena; that frame is what 19th century physicists meant by "the ether."
I think the main disagreement here is that your standards for "generally accepted documentation" include scripture, and mine don't. The original poster did not say enough to tell what his standards were; his claim is certainly sloppy from the point of view of scripture.
I don't mean to insult anyone's religious beliefs, but I personally think there is a wide range of possibilities for the historical Christ, ranging from "never existed" to "flaky cult leader whose followers managed to convince themselves of the resurrection" to "wise thinker whose followers managed to convince themselves of the resurrection" to "divine son of God, Messiah, Savior, etc., etc." Neither extreme seems completely credible to me, particularly when you consider examples of other religious figures from the same viewpoint; however, there is not a lot of hard evidence to narrow it down.
Anyhow, picking different points within that range would have a great influence on how you interpret the passages you cite: e.g., how metaphorical was Christ about the use of the term "abba/Father"?
Also, the point with Franklin is that to make him up, one would have had to fabricate an absolutely enormous amount of trivial detail *unrelated* to Franklin. He's linked to documented events in France, in Great Britain, in Boston, in Philadelphia, ranging from the political to the literary to the scientific.
Whereas for Christ, we have the Gospels, which are probably something like two independent sources, we have the letters of Paul, we've got a certain amount of oral tradition, and we have brief mentions in other histories.
Hey, I never said Christ didn't exist, or even that I don't believe he was divine. Just that these statements don't have much by way of proof; we have evidence, but pretty much only scriptural, not objective.
In a discussion based on "what we believe although we can't prove" it makes sense to be careful to distinguish evidence from proof. I think I'm being quite settled down---just nit-picky.
Al Qaeda are often clever and resourceful, but they aren't necessarily uber-elite hackers.
After all, for quite some time they thought they could maintain communication security by repeatedly exchanging cell phones. However, they got caught up by the fact that the SIM module, which they transferred from phone-to-phone was the actual identifiable piece of hardware.
Also, their ideas on such things as dirty bombs showed a lack of expert knowledge.
That said, you don't have to be a super-elite hacker with ultra-super encryption to not get caught, which is good enough for them, and bad news for the rest of civilization.
No, your post cited material which *claims* he made that claim. Which is no more convincing than material which claims he is divine. It is evidence, but to my mind not convincing, because the source is irretrievably biased. Any text where Christ was quoted as saying "no, I'm an ordinary guy" would have been weeded out by the process of determining the Christian canon.
Most importantly, the people who wrote the Gospels wrote *to encourage others to believe in Christ.* They are not impartial historical accounts.
You also apparently can't tell the difference between Santa Claus and Jesus Christ, because you mix up which I was speaking about in my post.
There is *much* more evidence, both physical and textual, for the existence of Benjamin Franklin, than there is for the existence of Jesus Christ as a human being as opposed to a religious figure. Mostly because Franklin lived much more recently, and because printing presses and so forth existed in Franklin's time, but not in Christ's.
For instance, we can go to the National Archives and see papers with Franklin's signature on them. I'm confident we can go into the dusty archives of Philadelphia and see records of his property transactions. We can see the building in which the Declaration of Independence was written. However, there is not a single physical artifact that is known to be associated with Jesus himself.
You will probably retort that "these are just written documents like the Gospels", but they are not. Franklin's records and documents have a tremendous amount of extraneous stuff that connects them to a coherent reality: there are dozens of other signatures on the Declaration, and we can go do the same exercise on each one of the participants to develop evidence that *they* existed. Along with the records of Franklin's property transactions, we would find a huge number of other property transactions, almost all of which are credible and make sense.
For the Gospels, the independent evidence for most of their statements is scarce, and only tenuously connected to the crucial points of Jesus's life and works.
So the fact that, using QED, physicists can calculate the results of experiments to an amazing number of significant figures, means nothing to you?
If not, you should realize that you have not bothered to learn what the word "photon" actually means, and your beliefs have nothing to do with scientific reality, but are just lazy navel contemplation.
You could try reading Russel & Whitehead's Principia Mathematica rather than doing it yourself. They take quite a while to get around to 1+1=2, though.
The writers of the texts you quoted *claim* or *report* that Jesus said those things. This is not the same as *proof* that Jesus said those things, much less that he existed as a real person.
If you think that is a trivial point, consider how many people know what Santa Claus looks like, the mode of transportation that he uses, that he says "ho, ho, ho" and leaves coal in bad childrens' stockings, etc., and how many consistent stories you can read about Santa Claus even though NO PERSON ACTUALLY EXISTED who IS/WAS THE SANTA CLAUS WE BELIEVE IN.
Yes, there was probably a real St. Nicholas, and you can claim that Santa Claus exists to the extent that he is a cultural entity, but Santa doesn't exist in the same way that Benjamin Franklin or Julius Caesar existed or you and I exist.
So, no matter how much you quote from the Bible, you can't prove that Christ existed beyond the fact that a lot of people believe in him, and that people in the first century wrote as if he existed.
Or you simply don't understand that a space-time manifold could *exist* without having to be *embedded in* a higher dimensional space. It's not expanding *into* anything, it is just expanding.
Or, even if it is, the space-time manifold of our universe does not, by itself, tell us anything about the higher dimensional space.
I'd also agree with the microeconomics suggestion.
The problem is his statement about the *macro*economics portion. Anyone who believes macroeconomics gets "disproved" regularly obviously didn't understand what macroeconomics was supposed to be about. The then-current belief that microeconomic principles apply to the economy as a whole is the primary intellectual reason the Great Depression lasted as long as it did. Keynes's explanation of the basic principles of macroeconmics is one of the great intellectual achievements of the 20th century---perhaps short of relativity and quantum mechanics, but close.
Actually, on re-reading, Joel also failed to learn the theory of comparative advantage, which is one of the most important non-trivial results in microeconomics.
Put plainly, Joel didn't distinguish himself very well with this article.
Actually, Thoreau went to a small college in Cambridge, Massachusetts by the name of Harvard College.
In his time, it *was* pretty much a small college, best suited for turning out ministers. He was most definitely not representative of the average product of Harvard, either then or now. Luckily, Harvard did little to dull his still unique intellectual approach.
Read Walden to get a clearer picture of Thoreau's opinions on education. In particular:
To my astonishment I was informed on leaving college that I had studied navigation! -- why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor I should have known more about it.
You economic reasoning seems confused. You are mixing up multiple concepts.
You are correct in one important insight, which is that the money labelling the transactions are not a finite amount of money being "used up" one transaction at a time.
However, there is most definitely a finite amount of land/raw materials, capital goods, and labor of more or less specialized skills available at any given time. It is possible for these scarce resources to be wasted when markets are inefficient.
One important way in which markets can be inefficient is when participants do not act rationally; another is that the price may not account for some benefit or harm. When governments allocate millions of dollars to build sports stadiums, for instance, it is not clear they are acting in the best public interest.
These failures have very little to do with the macroeconomic failure when interest rates are not set to induce a healthy amount of consumption vs. investment.
Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th
on
New and Improved SETI
·
· Score: 1
true charity is anonymous
While some givers prefer to be anonymous, for understandable and respectable reasons, there is also the possibility that the attachment of "Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation" or some other famous name to a particular cause helps justify it to other sources of support.
That is, there is better PR for a charitable cause when a big name gives a big donation, rather than just adding another "Anonymous" to their list of donors.
I'm sure if Bill & Melinda Gates offered to give a large amount of money to an organization anonymously, there would be at least a gentle effort to make their identity public.
If anything, Bill & Melinda Gates are more likely to hide their identity if they feel the donation is *smaller* than would otherwise be expected. If Bill Gates puts a quarter in the Salvation Army bucket, I'm sure he doesn't want his name attached---why not at least a fifty, Billy?
PhD + MBA is probably an indication of too much school and too little real world experience.
PhD's with enough real world savvy to make it in business don't need an MBA to learn how to write a business plan. If nothing else, they find an experienced MBA-type to write one.
MBAs with enough technical savvy to make it in high-tech don't want to waste years on a thesis project that has no commercial application. They want to make things happen in the real world.
More likely, PhD + MBA combinations combine the worst of both worlds: the ivory tower obsession with technical minutia irrelevant to real-world success, and the stuffed-shirt idea that Powerpoint presentations and budgets are what make things happen.
This is funny not only because it is true, but also because it is (intentionally?) self-parody.
Way to go!
I tried to add something about software "engineering" having to ship products while lit-crit types don't have to write a novel anyone would ever read. But in the world of ESR and Slashdot, you are free to judge technological matters without ever doing much more engineering than unwrapping boxes from NewEgg. Your logic still defeats me!
Slashdot Mirror
How one gets "huge" numbers depends on what you mean by "huge." One uses different nuclear decay chains to measure much older dates (say, billions of years vs. thousands). Age-of-the-universe estimates involve very different processes than age-of-moon, age-of-Earth, age-of-a-fossil, age-of-a-lava-flow, age-of-a-pot-shard, age-of-a-painting, and age/time-of-death-of-a-murder-victim, just to name a few. All involve some assumptions about what one is looking at, physics/chemistry/biology to model the change in the sample since the date of origin, and other experimental data sources to calibrate the time scale of the process.
For nuclear decay processes, it is possible to measure half-lives directly using large samples of isotopically-pure materials in the laboratory, along with sensitive detection of radioactivity. (For instance: http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRC/v10/i1/p383_1). Roughly speaking, radioactive decay can be measured on billions of billions of atoms at the rate of millions of decays in a day to determine how many billions of years the half-life is.
One must assume that nuclear decays is a random process, which is consistent with basically all laboratory observations, and one must assume that nuclear physics was the same billions of years ago as it is today, but there is indirect evidence that this assumption is at least not wildly inaccurate.
Nuclear physicists can also model the nuclear dynamics that determine nuclear half-lives and the stability of various nuclei and their reaction pathways.
There are also model assumptions, such as the relative isotopic concentrations in the sample at the date of origin. These must be obtained indirectly, or by reasonable judgement.
Scientists have real reasons for saying the universe is billions of years old. People used to argue the observed universe might be literally eternal, just as they argued that it is something like 6000 years old. Modern science has discarded *both* extremes, so it is not particularly biased one way or another. I don't know of anyone arguing today for a universe or earth 50 million, 500 million, 50 billion, 500 billion, or 5 trillion years old. Science has really eliminated a wide range of possibilities. As opposed to people who have one book that they keep holding up as the source of their knowledge, regardless of what anyone else observes.
You are using the term "historically documented" very loosely, if you are including the flood in Genesis. Do fairy tales count as historical documentation for the wolf eating Little Red Riding Hood? That little pigs once built houses?
The evidence for a "great dying" is similarly obtained as evidence that shows that there was no human existence before about 2 million years ago, no human civilization before a few thousand years ago, while the mass extinctions took place tens and hundreds of millions of years ago.
It has nothing at all to do with any human culture, history, or legend. Your "documented explanation" explains exactly nothing about the "great dying" in question. And to suppose it does, you would have to assume that dinosaurs and wooly mammoths were on Noah's ark as well.
To the extent that biblical "documentation" of biological or paleontological matters makes any kind of testable predicition, it fails miserably. There is absolutely no scientific reason to give the Bible credence as a source of any physical or biological knowledge. Even when it can be used as historical knowledge, it has apparently exaggerated the size and influence of the Kingdom of David, for instance, as would be expected from an observer showing human biases.
Actually, those links you provide don't consist of "real research," either.
Everyone knows radioactive dating has various limitations and caveats, which could affect any measurement. Trumpeting this like it is some hidden secret of the anti-creationists is misleading.
Trying to hide absolutely absurd theories behind the small percentage of genuinely doubtful radioactive dating results, and absolutely ignoring the huge number of uncontroversial dating results which contradict these theories is completely hypocritical.
Another way these creationists work is they take some sample that is way out of the age for which a lab process is accurate, find that the lab process indeed gives inaccurate results for these samples, and claim that this is a problem with "carbon" dating. Or, they selectively use anomalous dating results to bolster their otherwise ludicrous ideas about geological history.
As far as the LGPL goes, you are only required to make the source code available to whomever you distribute the software.
Not "anyone who wants it."
What I meant by civil records is the idea that there is something like a municipal ledger recording specific information about individuals: registering deeds, births, deaths, marriages, court cases, etc. It seemed by your suggestion that Jesus *should* be found in census records that you were referring to a manuscript list of individual names with occupations or something similar.
There is no doubt that the Empire knew with some accuracy how many citizens and other people it had in each of its districts, and probably had aggregate data on things like agricultural output.
Just that these aggregate data don't have any connection to a particular individual you might hope to learn about.
You won't find my name even in modern U.S. census records, even though I have been counted. The fraction of Romans whose personal identifying information were preserved on any "permanent" document, much less a surviving one, is absolutely miniscule, as far as I can tell; and more likely to be correlated to closeness to Rome and influence in mainstream Roman arts, letters, or politics, not to rabblerousing in a distant province.
No, the point is your belief appears to be meaningless gibberish. Also, the key point of your belief is apparently that you *disbelive* some portion of relativity or current theories of electrodynamics. I am asking you to explain what it is you disbelieve in well-tested areas of physics.
Beliefs in these areas are usually subject to experimental test. Good faith requires that you compare the consequences of your beliefs to the results of experiments, and if they contradict experiment, to abandon those beliefs.
Some people also believe they can trisect the angle with straightedge and compass; they can be proven *wrong*. That they continue to believe it proves they are incapable of understanding the meaning of proof.
I'm not aware of any substantial corpus of civil records surviving from Roman times. It is unrealistic to suppose that there are huge archives of Roman documents to find evidence remaining of any commoner's life. Is there any remaining fragment whatsoever of *any* Roman census record?
It is not surprising, therefore, that we lack such archival evidence of Jesus' life.
So, instead of an incredibly well-proven theory with definite techniques of calculation, based on the principle that Lorentz-invariance is a basis of physical theory, you have an alternative
"free-floating particles that surf on light waves of Ether"
Which of your terms have any real meaning---what do
- free-floating
- particles
- surf
- light waves [as opposed to photons]
- Ether
mean in your theory? What formulas do I write down to calculate the Lamb shift, and the gyromagnetic ratio of the electron? How do I calculate Compton scattering? How do I describe laser action? Is your theory Lorentz-invariant? Does it reproduce the relativistic behavior of cosmic muons and particles in colliders?
Relativity is not just one experiment; it is hundreds of experimental results that indicate that there is no preferred rest frame for electromagnetic phenomena; that frame is what 19th century physicists meant by "the ether."
In favor of your theory there is exactly NOTHING.
I think the main disagreement here is that your standards for "generally accepted documentation" include scripture, and mine don't. The original poster did not say enough to tell what his standards were; his claim is certainly sloppy from the point of view of scripture.
I don't mean to insult anyone's religious beliefs, but I personally think there is a wide range of possibilities for the historical Christ, ranging from "never existed" to "flaky cult leader whose followers managed to convince themselves of the resurrection" to "wise thinker whose followers managed to convince themselves of the resurrection" to "divine son of God, Messiah, Savior, etc., etc." Neither extreme seems completely credible to me, particularly when you consider examples of other religious figures from the same viewpoint; however, there is not a lot of hard evidence to narrow it down.
Anyhow, picking different points within that range would have a great influence on how you interpret the passages you cite: e.g., how metaphorical was Christ about the use of the term "abba/Father"?
Also, the point with Franklin is that to make him up, one would have had to fabricate an absolutely enormous amount of trivial detail *unrelated* to Franklin. He's linked to documented events in France, in Great Britain, in Boston, in Philadelphia, ranging from the political to the literary to the scientific.
Whereas for Christ, we have the Gospels, which are probably something like two independent sources, we have the letters of Paul, we've got a certain amount of oral tradition, and we have brief mentions in other histories.
Hey, I never said Christ didn't exist, or even that I don't believe he was divine. Just that these statements don't have much by way of proof; we have evidence, but pretty much only scriptural, not objective.
In a discussion based on "what we believe although we can't prove" it makes sense to be careful to distinguish evidence from proof. I think I'm being quite settled down---just nit-picky.
Al Qaeda are often clever and resourceful, but they aren't necessarily uber-elite hackers.
After all, for quite some time they thought they could maintain communication security by repeatedly exchanging cell phones. However, they got caught up by the fact that the SIM module, which they transferred from phone-to-phone was the actual identifiable piece of hardware.
Also, their ideas on such things as dirty bombs showed a lack of expert knowledge.
That said, you don't have to be a super-elite hacker with ultra-super encryption to not get caught, which is good enough for them, and bad news for the rest of civilization.
No, your post cited material which *claims* he made that claim. Which is no more convincing than material which claims he is divine. It is evidence, but to my mind not convincing, because the source is irretrievably biased. Any text where Christ was quoted as saying "no, I'm an ordinary guy" would have been weeded out by the process of determining the Christian canon.
Most importantly, the people who wrote the Gospels wrote *to encourage others to believe in Christ.* They are not impartial historical accounts.
You also apparently can't tell the difference between Santa Claus and Jesus Christ, because you mix up which I was speaking about in my post.
There is *much* more evidence, both physical and textual, for the existence of Benjamin Franklin, than there is for the existence of Jesus Christ as a human being as opposed to a religious figure. Mostly because Franklin lived much more recently, and because printing presses and so forth existed in Franklin's time, but not in Christ's.
For instance, we can go to the National Archives and see papers with Franklin's signature on them. I'm confident we can go into the dusty archives of Philadelphia and see records of his property transactions. We can see the building in which the Declaration of Independence was written. However, there is not a single physical artifact that is known to be associated with Jesus himself.
You will probably retort that "these are just written documents like the Gospels", but they are not. Franklin's records and documents have a tremendous amount of extraneous stuff that connects them to a coherent reality: there are dozens of other signatures on the Declaration, and we can go do the same exercise on each one of the participants to develop evidence that *they* existed. Along with the records of Franklin's property transactions, we would find a huge number of other property transactions, almost all of which are credible and make sense.
For the Gospels, the independent evidence for most of their statements is scarce, and only tenuously connected to the crucial points of Jesus's life and works.
So the fact that, using QED, physicists can calculate the results of experiments to an amazing number of significant figures, means nothing to you?
If not, you should realize that you have not bothered to learn what the word "photon" actually means, and your beliefs have nothing to do with scientific reality, but are just lazy navel contemplation.
You could try reading Russel & Whitehead's Principia Mathematica rather than doing it yourself. They take quite a while to get around to 1+1=2, though.
No, your life is too short. Get over it.
uh, slight correction to your post.
The writers of the texts you quoted *claim* or *report* that Jesus said those things. This is not the same as *proof* that Jesus said those things, much less that he existed as a real person.
If you think that is a trivial point, consider how many people know what Santa Claus looks like, the mode of transportation that he uses, that he says "ho, ho, ho" and leaves coal in bad childrens' stockings, etc., and how many consistent stories you can read about Santa Claus even though NO PERSON ACTUALLY EXISTED who IS/WAS THE SANTA CLAUS WE BELIEVE IN.
Yes, there was probably a real St. Nicholas, and you can claim that Santa Claus exists to the extent that he is a cultural entity, but Santa doesn't exist in the same way that Benjamin Franklin or Julius Caesar existed or you and I exist.
So, no matter how much you quote from the Bible, you can't prove that Christ existed beyond the fact that a lot of people believe in him, and that people in the first century wrote as if he existed.
I beleive that the big bang never happened...
Or you simply don't understand that a space-time manifold could *exist* without having to be *embedded in* a higher dimensional space. It's not expanding *into* anything, it is just expanding.
Or, even if it is, the space-time manifold of our universe does not, by itself, tell us anything about the higher dimensional space.
I'd also agree with the microeconomics suggestion.
The problem is his statement about the *macro*economics portion. Anyone who believes macroeconomics gets "disproved" regularly obviously didn't understand what macroeconomics was supposed to be about. The then-current belief that microeconomic principles apply to the economy as a whole is the primary intellectual reason the Great Depression lasted as long as it did. Keynes's explanation of the basic principles of macroeconmics is one of the great intellectual achievements of the 20th century---perhaps short of relativity and quantum mechanics, but close.
Actually, on re-reading, Joel also failed to learn the theory of comparative advantage, which is one of the most important non-trivial results in microeconomics.
Put plainly, Joel didn't distinguish himself very well with this article.
Actually, Thoreau went to a small college in Cambridge, Massachusetts by the name of Harvard College.
In his time, it *was* pretty much a small college, best suited for turning out ministers. He was most definitely not representative of the average product of Harvard, either then or now. Luckily, Harvard did little to dull his still unique intellectual approach.
Read Walden to get a clearer picture of Thoreau's opinions on education. In particular:
To my astonishment I was informed on leaving college that I had studied navigation! -- why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor I should have known more about it.
You economic reasoning seems confused. You are mixing up multiple concepts.
You are correct in one important insight, which is that the money labelling the transactions are not a finite amount of money being "used up" one transaction at a time.
However, there is most definitely a finite amount of land/raw materials, capital goods, and labor of more or less specialized skills available at any given time. It is possible for these scarce resources to be wasted when markets are inefficient.
One important way in which markets can be inefficient is when participants do not act rationally; another is that the price may not account for some benefit or harm. When governments allocate millions of dollars to build sports stadiums, for instance, it is not clear they are acting in the best public interest.
These failures have very little to do with the macroeconomic failure when interest rates are not set to induce a healthy amount of consumption vs. investment.
true charity is anonymous
While some givers prefer to be anonymous, for understandable and respectable reasons, there is also the possibility that the attachment of "Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation" or some other famous name to a particular cause helps justify it to other sources of support.
That is, there is better PR for a charitable cause when a big name gives a big donation, rather than just adding another "Anonymous" to their list of donors.
I'm sure if Bill & Melinda Gates offered to give a large amount of money to an organization anonymously, there would be at least a gentle effort to make their identity public.
If anything, Bill & Melinda Gates are more likely to hide their identity if they feel the donation is *smaller* than would otherwise be expected. If Bill Gates puts a quarter in the Salvation Army bucket, I'm sure he doesn't want his name attached---why not at least a fifty, Billy?
almost always the case that the parents buy the games themselves
Indeed; that's the whole point of the ratings; little Johnny tells her "everybody is getting grand theft auto...it's just about racing cars."
The M rating shows that little Johnny isn't being honest about the content of the game. Unpleasant parental surprise avoided.
But it turns out parents (and other adult relatives buying for gifts) don't understand the ratings, and get inappropriate games for young kids.
PhD + MBA is probably an indication of too much school and too little real world experience.
PhD's with enough real world savvy to make it in business don't need an MBA to learn how to write a business plan. If nothing else, they find an experienced MBA-type to write one.
MBAs with enough technical savvy to make it in high-tech don't want to waste years on a thesis project that has no commercial application. They want to make things happen in the real world.
More likely, PhD + MBA combinations combine the worst of both worlds: the ivory tower obsession with technical minutia irrelevant to real-world success, and the stuffed-shirt idea that Powerpoint presentations and budgets are what make things happen.
This is funny not only because it is true, but also because it is (intentionally?) self-parody.
Way to go!
I tried to add something about software "engineering" having to ship products while lit-crit types don't have to write a novel anyone would ever read. But in the world of ESR and Slashdot, you are free to judge technological matters without ever doing much more engineering than unwrapping boxes from NewEgg. Your logic still defeats me!